Ramblings from a compromised mind.

Major Vista Problem Strikes

As of last Friday, something nasty seems to have happened to my Vista 5600 install. Basically the problem started when I came in in the morning. Instead of logging into my session that I had locked out the night before, it was at the initial logon screen. I figured it musta just taken a dump and so I logged in. Everything seemed fine until I went to run Excel. I clicked it on the start menu, got no error, but it never launched. I tried again, no good. Here’s the weird part: if I actually go to the .exe in Program Files and click on it, it runs. Then the problems got worse. I launched WMP to listen to some music and my entire library was gone. Oh, it’s still all there on disc, but the WMP meta-data is completely gone. I looked at my settings and it had all the paths that I wanted it to watch in there, but I cleared them out and tried to add it again to get it to rebuild the library. This didn’t work at all. It cleared all the paths, but now I can’t add any paths back in. Since then, Excel is not the only program I can’t run every time. WMP now won’t run off the quick launch or start menu either. Nor will PowerShell.

As for the application start up problems, the only thing I can think of is that something must be hosed with PreFetch. If you look at your start menu and quick launch links, the shortcuts all have /prefetch:1 as an argument. Obviously when I click the exe in explorer this parameter isn’t passed. Anyone have any clue how to “clear” the prefetch cache or whatever?

As for my WMP library disappearing, I have no clue if it’s related or not, but it sure sucks. Looks like I’ll be upgrading to 57xx sooner than expected. 🙁